Browsing Posts tagged Raccoons

Yesterday we awoke to the news that three golden eagles had been caught in trappers’ snares set in Montana east of the Divide. Two are dead; one requires surgery to remove the cable now embedded in her wing and shoulder. Whoever came upon the bird was carrying cable cutters (likely the trapper, but this is unknown); that individual cut the cable but provided no assistance to the severely-injured bird. Thankfully, she’s now in the care of the Montana Raptor Conservation Center in Bozeman (visit their Facebook page, which is the source of the accompanying photo).

There is no defense for the use of snares. They are designed for one thing only: to provide animals with a cruel, terrifying, and gruesome death, the wire cable cutting deeper into their bodies as the noose tightens the more they struggle. Often it’s the windpipe that’s crushed or cut; other times, as in the case [of] this eagle, the snare tightens around bodies, wings, or legs (graphic photo: what a snare does to a coyote; graphic video: a raccoon snared around the body, finished off with bullets). A Minnesota dog survived four days on the run with her mouth wired shut by a snare embedding itself in her flesh (video here) prior to being rescued and rehabbed; other dogs haven’t been as fortunate. And at least one human reports being snared by the foot. Snares are cheap and sold by the dozen … and by the hundred.

Because snaring (and all trapping to kill) is indefensible regardless of whether the victim is targeted or incidental, enthusiasts tend to divert blame elsewhere. (We’ve seen the same thing happen in the gun debate. Outlaw guns because they kill people? Then you’d better also outlaw cars.) Check out the comments at the news story that opens this piece and you’ll find an entire school of red herrings on the deadliness of wind turbines, as if this somehow exonerates trapping. But in fact, bird deaths (in general) from turbines are rare when compared to bird deaths caused by collisions with windows, according to Clean Technica. Furthermore, bird-safe wind turbine technology is in the works. So while science and technology evolve to safeguard wildlife, trappers remain firmly rooted in the primitive past, wielding archaic devices of torture to kill for money, for fun, sometimes for food, and to rid their world of “nuisances.” continue reading…

There are whole branches of human enterprise, corporate and political, devoted to disproving the incontrovertible facts that the world’s climate is changing and that human agency has at least something to do with it. There are mountains of evidence to present against any such objection, one of them a recently announced little bit of news from subterranean Ireland.

Now, if you remember your school-day Latin and our friend Gaius Julius Caesar, you’ll recall that Gallia is divisa in partes tres. One of those partes is Aquitania, where something else divisible hails from, namely the earthworm called Prosellodrilus amplisetosus. Aquitaine, as the modern French province is called, enjoys a mean air temperature that is still about 3 degrees centigrade higher than the British Isles, but there things are heating up sufficiently that a population of P. amplisetosus is now thriving in a Dublin garden bed. How it got there we don’t yet know for sure; it may have been introduced by means of imported plants, despite strict European Union controls on such things.

Happily, report the good people at University College Dublin, this Mediterranean earthworm does not constitute a harmfully invasive species, since it does not compete with any extant population for resources. The news brings to 27 the number of earthworm species on the Emerald Isle.continue reading…

"Service Animal" Scammers (New Yorker): An increasing number of your neighbors have been keeping company with their pets in human-only establishments simply by claiming that the creatures are their licensed companion animals and are necessary to their mental well-being.